Numerical and Experimental Approach for Identifying Elastic Parameters in Sandwich Plates

Abstract

This article deals with the identification of elastic parameters (engineering constants) in sandwich honeycomb orthotropic rectangular plates. A non-destructive method is introduced to identify the elastic parameters through the experimental measurements of natural frequencies of a plate undergoing free vibrations. Four elastic constant are identified. The estimation of the elastic parameter problem is solved by minimizing the differences between the measured and the calculated natural frequencies. The numerical method to calculate the natural frequencies involves the formulation of Rayleigh-Ritz using a series of characteristic orthogonal polynomials to properly model the free edge boundary conditions. The analysis of the results indicates the efficiency of the method.